Thursday, July 26, 2012

Ichiro Suzuki received 48% of the fan vote responding to the question of the game yesterday: which of four players recently acquired by contenders would have the greatest impact. Hanley Ramirez was second with 38%.

As a Yankee fan I'm embarrassed. Ichiro? The Yankees don't even need Ichiro. I don't know why they acquired him. His numbers are way down in 2012: .262 BA, .290 OBP and OPS+ 83. His career OPS+ is only 113. 2011 .272 BA, .310 OBP. That sucks.It's batting average (BA), the venerable baseball stat that won't die. Ichiro has .322 career BA with a modest .366 OBP, which is really low considering his BA. Plus, Ichiro led the American conference two of his first four seasons: .350 and .372. Also, .351 and .352 in later seasons. People are still really impressed with BA.

But the guy does not walk and does not hit home runs. He gets on base.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Rodriguez is number 14 on the list for Runs scored. Scoring another 50 runs will move Rodriguez past Craig Biggio, Mel Ott, Tris Speaker and Lou Gehrig into tenth place.So by the end of the 2012 season Alex Rodriguez should be #4 in home runs, #6 in RBI and #10 in Runs.Derek Jeter's claim to offensive fame is that he gets on base, runs the bases well and scores. Jeter is #17 in Runs (1,785) 53 behind Rodriguez and unlikely to ever catch him, especially considering that Jeter is 13 months older than Rodriguez:Jeter born: June 26, 1974Rodriguez born: July 27, 1975______________________________________

During last night's Yankee 4-3 loss in Oakland Derek Jeter scored a run, which tied him with Eddie Collins at #16 with 1,821 runs scored. The Yankee Entertainment Sports (YES) network put a list of players on the screen to show where Jeter was on the all time list but did not show all players ahead of Jeter. Below Jeter YES highlighted the leader: Rickey Henderson at 2,295. Above Collins and Jeter the partial list showed:14. Craig Biggio 1,844
15. Frank Robinson 1,829

Had YES shown just two more players viewers would have seen this:12. Alex Rodriguez 1,874
13. Mel Ott 1,859

Why not show Jeter's Yankee teammate Alex Rodriguez? Was this done intentionally or was it simply a case of stupidity? Did someone think it would diminish Jeter to show him moving up the list but still behind his much better teammate? Or did the person simply not know? Even the announcers for the game, Ken Singleton and David Cone did not mention Rodriguez.The Yankees and YES and all broadcasters should always show a complete list even if it means scanning up and down. The list should include some additional context such as plate appearances, at bats, years played, Hall of Fame, years played.For all the fuss about Reggie Jackson criticizing Alex Rodriguez recently the Yankees themselves continue to demean the extraordinary accomplishments of Alex Rodriguez.See Thursday, June 9, 2011 Derek Jeter v. Álex RodríguezOK, it's pretty obvious that Álex Rodríguez is a much better player than Derek Jeter.

Monday, July 16, 2012

It's absurd that baseball allows coaches to stand on the field full time at first and third base. And that it permits visits to the pitchers. Two visits per pitcher. So why not allow visits to the batters? And the fielders? And base runners?

Thursday, July 12, 2012

The last four games that the Yankees played before the all star break were in Boston: Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, Sunday night. Here are times to complete those nine inning games and the TV broadcaster.

3:59 Yanks won 10-8 local TV
3:07 Yanks won 6-1 local TV
3:36 Red Sox won 9-5 Fox (Red Sox did not bat in ninth)
4:02 Yanks won 7-3 ESPN

TV broadcaster does not seem to be the only culprit in making these games LONG, boring and unwatchable. I fired up the DVR for at least the final excruciating innings of each game so that I could fast forward between each pitch because each batter steps out of the box between each pitch to wander aimlessly for no apparent reason other than his batting coach has no better instruction. And, of course, the pitching coach had given comparable instruction to his wards.As mentioned here previously game seven of the 1960 World Series took 2:36. Final score: 10-9 Pirates over the Yankees. More runs were scored in that game than in any of the four in Boston. OK, the Pirates still had three outs to go so the game could have taken longer but it still would have been much shorter than the recent mess in Boston. Most people blame the commercials and pitching changes for the games being so long. That 1960 WS game had a comparable number of pitching changes. Pitchers should be changed on the fly: no mound visit, no warm-ups. That would speed things up. Commercials are not going away.But what really sucks the life out of Major Baseball League (MBL) games is the dead time between each of the 300 pitches. MBL money grubbers are not even making money during those pointless delays, unless MBL wants to keep its captive audience at the park longer to entice fans to buy more over priced stuff.Meanwhile, at home, viewers like me are increasingly turning off and/or doing other stuff and not paying attention to the game. MBL is in trouble that will cause it to crash by the year 2020 when MBL will predictably do too little, too late.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

This is an experiment. I used free Google Hangouts On Air to record and broadcast this live just a few minutes ago. The recording is available on youtube at the link above. Obviously, no one was likely to have realized that there was a live event in time to join this public hangout but in the future I might schedule an event and make that known here at my written blog.

Google Hangouts On Air permits up to nine others to join simultaneously. As moderator I can drop someone who is disruptive and even ban that person from future participation.

This could be a better more dynamic medium than the blogtalkradio thing I did for a while:

Monday, July 9, 2012

During last night's Yankee game in Fenway Park Boston Yankee captain and icon Derek Jeter dropped a routine pop fly for an error and an unearned run. Red Sox fans cheered. That was not unexpected but what was surprising was that the cheering persisted and clearly turned into mocking Jeter.

I am a Yankee fan but I realize that the baseball deification of Derek Jeter is premature, unwarranted and overdone. Still, the guy plays hard and almost always says the right thing, no matter how boring. See:

So why mock Jeter? Was it Boston's parochialism that led it to abuse its greatest athlete, Bill Russell of the Celtics? Was it the insulation of having more black people on the two baseballteams combined than in the Fenway stands?

I've seen his before. In 1978 Boston fans mocked Yankee pitcher Catfish Hunter when the Red Sox drove the clearly ailing Hunter from the mound. What satisfaction did they derive? Catfish, who stoically took the abuse, was another noble warrior who never offended them except that he played for the Yankees. Jeter does not merely play for the Yankees. Derek Jeter is a Yankee. Always was. Always will be.

New York's not perfect. To quote myself:

I never met a Met fan who knew what he was talking about ... or a Boston fan of any sport.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

I was glancing at the pitch by pitch for a game today and saw NF (Nasty Factor) in addition to a description (fastball, slider, etc.) and miles per hour (mph). I can't find the balloon definition but it seemed interesting.

For the few minutes I followed the game this way it helped me see what the previous batter had done, which I missed because I was so bored I was doing other stuff, like watching the 1972 movie 1776. Hey, I'm a real American.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

The Major Baseball League (MBL) has pretty easy standards for qualifying for leading in an average category.

For batters: 502 plate appearances (PA), even for batting average (BA), which does not use PA as its denominator. Go figure.

For pitchers: 162 innings.

Jimmy Rollins set the record for PA in 2007: 778. Only 28 times have batters had at least 750 PA.

For a batter to qualify for BA leadership in each conference in the same season the batter would need at least 502 PA times 2: 1,004. That's very unlikely.

However, it is possible for a pitcher to qualify. Many pitchers in modern times have had 162*2 = 324 innings in a season. Since WWII (for the twitter intelligentsia, that's World War II (2): "since" would be after 1945) it's been done 27 times. For instance, Sandy Koufax had 335 innings pitched (IP) in 1965 and 323 in 1966, just one short.